Blogs on Formative Assessment

One of the greatest potentials for PBL is that it calls for authentic assessment. In a well-designed PBL project, the culminating product is presented publicly for a real audience. PBL is also standards-based pedagogy. Oftentimes when I consult and coach teachers in PBL, they ask about the assessment of standards. With the pressures of high stakes testing and traditional assessments, teachers and administrators need to make sure they accurately design projects that target the standards they need students to know and be able to do.

Editor's Note: Today's guest blogger is Shawn Cornally, author of the Standards-Based Grading. Here, he presents a blog carnival on redefining assessment. It's a complex issue, and one that we tackle in the next Schools that Work series here on Edutopia.

It's the holiday season, which means, once the eating and entertaining is over, many of us will have some free time on our hands. If you want to spend some of that time snuggling up with a great book, here are some books that I have read (or re-read) in the past year or so that have influenced my teaching. Not all of them are technology-related, but they have applications for technology integration.

The books are not listed in any particular order of importance.

Editor's Note: Author, Jennifer Sharpe, is Director of Secondary Education for Nash-Rocky Mount Schools and Associate Director/K-12 Liaison for the Tar River Writing Project (TRWP) at East Carolina University.

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
- Willa Cather